Online Business & HR Management Software

We are very please to announce the release of our most significant update to MyWebWorkplace yet. It is especially important as it represents the transition from a comprehensive business absence management system to a multi-modular business management system (sometimes known also as a business automation system). The priority in this release was to add the beginnings of an HR system but also to add more control and flexibility to our users access and permissions. This will become increasingly more important as we add more business modules.

System functionality can be switch on and off (individual unused elements of each business module)

All menus are now database driven to allow for a finer control of access (who you are, what you do, where you are in the company and your relationships all determine what you can see and do in MyWebWorkplace)

New rules available: Maximum duration of absence request in the leave year (e.g 8 off site working days, 1 birthday)

Bulk approval of leave requests that have not conflicted with any leave rules

All employees who leave your employment will continue to be available in People > Leavers

Better control of entitlement adjustments in People > employee name > Leave years, including summary of change in hours

If a request becomes unable to be approved (due to a rule conflict) after it has been submitted for approval, the manager can now reject it but not approve it

People > employee name > Holiday/leave now shows both current leave (i.e. in the future or outstanding) and completed leave (i.e. in the past or canceled/rejected/withdrawn)

To use the 'Remember me for a day' feature on the login page, add https://mwwp.me/AbsenceManagement as a shortcut or bookmark, and use this to navigate back to the site. Do not logout or go to http://mwwp.me/login as this will fry the security cookie that keeps you logged in. If you need to login, MyWebWorkplace will take you to the login page automatically

Mandatory Leave can now be added after the leave year has been created (NOTE: any new Mandatory days added must not be immediately next to an existing one)

New Reports section on the left hand menu: initial reports are included in people and Holiday/leave. More reports to come.

New Directory section on the left hand menu: Company locations can be added in Admin > Locations/Contacts and then assigned to each employee in People > employee name > Edit > Work location. Employee Company Phone and Mobile contact information can also be added here. The directory is fully searchable by name, group and location

Minor bug fixes

We will continue to strive to make MyWebWorkplace.net even better. If you know any businesses that would benefit from MyWebWorkplace please tell them about us.

Once again it is time for a long list of improvements that we have been busy making to MyWebWorkplace to ensure it's the best online absence management system on the market.

Better email controls. All emails can be turned on and off as required or just the leave or sickness one independently of each other. This is a useful feature to use while adding leave and sickness that has occurred prior to setting up your MWWP site.

Your managers can choose to not receive their email notifications of leave awaiting approval or sickness information and can choose a colleague to receive them instead. If no alternative has been selected the system will hunt down the best alternative based on either the top admin user in their group, any admin in their group, any admin most closely related in the company or a specified email address. The emails can also be CC'd to any of the above.

Work patterns show the employees who are associated to them and those employees (individually or in groups) can be reassigned to another work pattern in just a few clicks.

The reseller/partner portal has been improved with more controls and personalised sign up and login URLs.

Groups and Areas are now hierarchical giving better permission controls and reporting facilities.

More control when adding an entitlement adjustment.

Links from the leave approval screen to employee and group information including quick access to the employees group calendar.

More absence rules available to help manage leave requests.

Annual increments (or annual service day awards) are calculated based on days or minutes to be added and any service year and now also percentages of base entitlement to calculate the number of days to be added.

Draft leave requests are available to view in the Admin area.

Minor bug fixes and usability improvements

The future of MyWebWorkplace is exciting, moving to manage more HR and operational areas of your business with the same care and attention as you have come to expect from us.

MyWebWorkplace.net is built with the same exacting [some might say fanatical] attention to detail as any other software we develop.

We make no functional distinction between MyWebWorkplace.net and the software we design for a large Plc's or multi-national's. It has always been our intention to create a high spec, low cost business process automation software for any company and now we are!

We don't take this task lightly. We maintain the highest levels of security both in our business procedures and in our code and ensure that our software is delivered using the most appropriately specified servers. In the case of MyWebWorkplace that means servers which, by our calculations will be wholly capable of delivering many 10's of 000's of clients. Each client has their own backend database (where most of the processing goes on), so if necessary we could move databases across to other servers to balance the load. We have a dedicated team of enthusiastic professionals focused on building and delivering MyWebWorkplace.net.Our goal is to provide businesses from all disciplines in all countries, with a superior, versatile, reliable and professional online tool to help them manage their business better...and it has started with leave and sickness management.

MyWebWorkplace.net - Absence Management has smashed all expectation after it was released on the 7th December 2009. Needless to say we are extremely pleased to see it being so well received after working so hard to develop and test it over the last year.

For those of you who don't know, MyWebWorkplace is a powerful business process automation system. Being a self service system, all your employees have permission based access to complete the many mundane and costly procedures that fill our business lives.

MyWebWorkplace will be a multi modular system, each of which will focus on a specific business area. Right now we have developed the answer to ineffective absence management which manages all aspects of leave & sickness in your business. In the near future we will be bringing expense, time-sheet and project management and each of these will be available separately so you can pick and choose the ones that suit you.

It's free to sign up and take a look for yourself. You can even add up to 3 employees to test its compatibility with your own processes. Just go to http://mwwp.me/client_new and register for your free trial. You will get access immediately.

As a special thank you to all our current clients and any future ones that sign up before the end of March 2010 we would like to offer you 6 months free use of MyWebWorkplace - absence management. This is a great opportunity to see for yourself what it can do for your business. Just register at htp://mwwp.me/client_new as normal and follow the guidance in the getting started guide below. It couldn't be easier. If you have any questions you can always contact our friendly and brilliant support team on 0844 736 1820 ext 2.

Integrated Project Systems is about to release a new on-demand service to help organisations of all sizes manage their business procedures.

The online system, MyWebWorkplace, will ultimately be an unrivaled group of modules, each focused on one specific area of business. The first release will incorporate Absence Management and subsequent versions will include Project Management, HR, time sheets, Expense Reporting, Document Management and personnel training to name but a few.

Each module will be a versatile, standalone product, built to manage all aspects of the area concerned. For instance, our absence management module will calculate annual leave entitlement, multiple calenders, leave rules, line manager approval, sickness management and much more.

Multiple modules, however will take advantage of the smart underlying data structure and module will share relevant information between them. For instance, when requesting leave the line manager will be able to see projects that are effected, absences will be automatically recorded on the time sheets, expenses and documents can be saved against projects and training courses recorded against employees training history.

MyWebWorkplace has been built on a strong foundation. Security and availability have been paramount concerns during these early stages of development but we have draw from years of experience delivering many process management systems for all types of companies to bring you a system that you can rely upon.

We never release beta software to the market and consequently many companies have already showed an interest in the first release. If you too would like to be notified when we make MyWebWorkplace available please send an email to subscribe@mywebworkplace.com

MyWebWorkplace will be available at the beginning of December 2009. As always we'll keep you posted.

It seems that the greatest concern when implementing a web based application is the possibility of downtime and lack of availability due to the fallibility of the many systems that come together to serve a website. Although this problem can never be entirely over come, it can be mitigated.

I can't speak for other SaaS operations, but this is how we have provided a 100% uptime service of our Programme Office Toolkit for the last few years.

Summary points are:

We provide Production and Failover services for both Websites and Databases.

The Production and Failover services are in geographically remote location and via different providers.

Failover web sites can also be used to access the Production database.

Backups

Production DB backups taken daily – held locally + transferred to failover + backed up on failover (production is backed up and held in 3 formats daily and held for 2 years)

Production website code is monitored daily for changes and any changes are transferred to the failover server.

All servers have Raided disk arrays so chances of losing any data is very slim (fire/theft are the only possible occurrences but all server halls have fire suppressant, cooling, UPS systems and full time, 24/7 security staff and secure access).

Production servers have a 1 hr replacement of key components so worst case scenario is max 1 hr downtime if not immediately failed over, if it is the website then no time is lost as the failover website is instantly available.

Failover servers are covered by a Dell 4 hour response contract.

IPS has been hosting with Rackspace (a very high quality and costly service provider) since 2003.

Historically never had any problems in past 5 years with POT with over 99.9% availability during client business hours.

Failovers procedures tested 4 times a year.

The platforms systems / POT3 software have been security and penetration tested by QinetiQ and passed.

The only thing we are not in control of is the Internet but all hosting providers have multiple redundancies on Internet connections. We also suggest our clients have redundant Internet connections from different providers.

IPS has a bilateral support agreement with another company (who also helped develop parts of POT3) to provide a flexible expansion in staffing capabilities during periods of high development demand should the current staff of either company need additional assistance or specialist knowledge.

We'd love to know: It's an understatement to say that there are a lot of Project Management systems currently available. What types of projects do you manage and which software do you use to implement them successfully? What features do you particularly enjoy and what's missing?